Online edition of Daily News

At the beginning, knowledge meant storing everything in your mind. Then came the book. Today all we have to do is to know where to find "knowledge". It is all there, or will soon be there, on the World Wide Web, as electronic books, journals, and encyclopaedias.

A papyrus scroll from the Egyptian Book of Death, a kind of guide book in which the deceased was told what gods and adventures he was likely to encounter.

Let us take a look at the history of books and writing, before moving on to e-books. I believe that the future lies in the e-book and I would like to stir your curiosity and interest in the e-book and prepare you to face a paperless society in the near future, whether you like it or not .

The oldest written story in the world is the epic of Gilgamesh, which had been recorded on 12 clay tablets, in ancient Sumerian, around 3000 B.C. Today its German and English translations are available as e-books, thus showing the transition across 5000 years, of the clay tablet into an e-book.

All the people who campaign for women's rights would be pleased to know the first writer in the world, known to us, is a woman, Enheduanna, who lived more than 5000 years ago. Her poem to the goddess Inana was written on wet clay tablets, which were then baked.

The significance of these tablets is that the author had written her name too, on the tablet. There could have been other writers, men and women, before her, but they had not given their names on their work. It could be that such writings were group efforts, or the ruling class did not allow them to be acknowledged.

Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon, the ruler who united Southern and Northern Mesopotamia. This would have allowed her to put her name down, on her work, without fear.

A clay tablet from the epic of Gilgamesh

Writing progressed from clay tablets to papyrus scrolls. The date of the earliest surviving scroll is around 2400 B.C. Later on, Greeks and Romans used wax tablets for correspondence and for writing down orders.

Writing made it easier to accumulate, record and pass on knowledge to future generations, and the first library was founded in Egypt 4000 years ago.

With the development of paper writing advanced to printing. The oldest known wood block for printing was found in China and dated 816 A. D. Progress was very slow, or the world has lost all the books that had been printed during this early period, because the next record we have is the printing of the Bible in 1450 by Guttenberg.

Sri Lanka can claim to have the biggest book in the world. The 'gal potha' or the 'stone book' of king Nissankamalla in Polonnaruwa. It is 26' 10" in length and 4' 7" wide. Its height varied from 2' 2" to 1' 4". It is the longest stone inscription in Sri Lanka consisting of 72 lines. As a book it is very short, with only three pages and a footnote.

I would like to consider the 'Sihigiri kat bitha', the so-called 'Mirror Wall', as probably the first interactive book in the world.

It should be considered one of the greatest literary creations in the world, and we have to be eternally grateful to Prof. Senarath Paranavitana, not only for copying, deciphering and translating the graffiti, but for studying the language, grammar, the subject matter, the authors and attempting to explain the unfamiliar words and phrases.

Sigiri Graffiti are a very good example to show that 'in poetry, fewer words say more things'. He had published 865 verses, in the Sigiri Graffiti, and since then, Benille Priyanka has published another 150 verses, left out by Paranavitana.

A very simple description is that it is a book published using an electronic or digital format, which could be displayed on a computer. It has also been described as any kind of reactive pages of electronic information that exhibit many of the characteristic features and properties of a conventional book.

The e-book was born in the electronic laboratories in the early '60s, but it took nearly 30 years to free it from the confines of a computer.

In 1991 Sony introduced the hand held electronic book. Today it has developed into a pocket library, but it will take a few more years for us to get used to reading a book on a small screen, scrolling page by page. But just like we still have a lot of resistance to accept the e-book, the printed book too was initially rejected.

People who had grown up with handwritten books, considered the printed format as the product of an inartistic trade, aesthetically inferior and probably with a lot of errors and so unreliable. Perhaps there were also a few people who wanted to monopolize all knowledge, which they had been able to do by limiting the number of copies of any book written.

The printed book had changed all that. Number of copies to be printed became unlimited and books were available readily, everywhere, enabling even the common man to learn to read and use all the data and knowledge which had been so far locked up as the exclusive property of the religious organizations, the ruling class and their henchmen.

The same thing probably would have happened when the orally transmitted books were to be written down. Today the burden on the human memory has been passed on to the electronic memory, so man could put his brain for better use, if he wanted to!

An e-book is not so easy on the eyes and it can never replace the printed page, is what some readers still say. But technology has found a solution.

An e-ink e-book will be in the market next month, with the readability of paper, in black and white, without any backlighting and with very little power consumption so that the batteries need not be replaced often. It is also very light so a reader could relax in bed or a couch with this new e-book.

Children today have to carry heavily loaded school bags, with huge books. If they had to carry only the hand held computer, or the palm top, and a stylus, how easy it would be for them. They could read their texts on the screen write their essays and do their sums on the screen. The teacher would not have to carry loads of exercise books home for correction.

The children could forward their work to the teacher's home computer, where she could mark them at leisure. Here too, she could get the computer do more than half the work, like checking the spelling and grammar. This is already happening in the Scandinavian countries.

The Department of Education would not have to spend millions of rupees publishing text books. They would not have to gather the text book writers to Colombo to do the writing.

The writers could work from home and forward their lessons or chapters of the text books to a central office where they could be edited and compiled. The finished work is downloaded at each school, by the teachers, students.

There would be no need of universities as we know them today. Your university will be inside your computer. You can download the lectures, do all your reference work, do your projects and assignments, and even sit the examinations from home.

Then in our country, the biggest advantage would be that there would be no more strikes and student violence. Most IT courses and certificates are now available. Unfortunately we can also buy any number of bogus degrees and certificates on-line.

The e-book and the audio book could also be a way to attract our youth to read more books, draw them away from the television. Our electronic media also could play a greater role in promoting books and creative works.

When considering the advantages of the e-book, we have also to consider the cost of manufacturing paper. I am not talking about the visible cost of production, but the environmental cost. When the first paper mill went into production 600 years ago in Nuremberg Germany, it was considered a major landmark in history, since then paper has been our slave, and we have also been made slaves of paper.

We have to kill trees to make books. Trees have to be cut down to make the paper pulp. The annual requirement is over 160 million tons of timber for paper making. When trees are cut, the paper manufactures argue that they do reforestation. But often reforestation is monocultural.

They plant only one type of tree, in a vast land area, which once would have been a complete ecosystem of many species of trees, shrubs, creepers, animals, birds, and insects.

Destruction of such an ecosystem cannot be balanced by one plantation, which requires agrochemicals as fertilizer and pesticides, because once an established ecosystem is destroyed, it will never be sustainable. Because the demand for water from these trees are far greater than in a natural forest. Green Peace call them 'tree farms'.

By the year 2010, at the rate we are consuming paper, there would be a shortage of around 500 million cubic meters of wood pulp, which would result in increased prices for paper, then the price of books and journals will go up taking them further away from our reach. This prediction itself should be sufficient encouragement for people to accept the e-book as the best option.

We are already paying for water we drink, we will soon be paying for the air we breathe. If we can save at least one tree by saying no to printed books, we will be making that much contribution towards preserving our environment.

The great Indian epics and the Buddhist Sutra were passed down orally for several centuries and the people who listened did not have to know how to read and write.

In the same manner with the continued advancements in digital technology, writing is becoming obsolete, anything to be written could be dictated directly into a computer. What is recorded could also be listened to. People do not write letters to each other anymore. They send e-mail. Now e-mail need not be written or read. We can listen to them.

Very soon we would not even have to learn how to sign our names. Our thumb print or eye print would do, where an electronic signature would not suffice. The time would come when we can dial-a-book, on our phone and listen to it, we can put it on speaker phone so that everyone in the room could listen. In such a situation our grandchildren need not learn to read and write.

Anyway they may not have to go to school at all, because they could follow interactive lessons from home. Only a few people would master the art of writing and it would become another special science. The rest of the human population would very soon become illiterate! Once again we could become an illiterate oral society.